mercredi 31 décembre 2014

C.S. Lewis: creationist and anti-evolutionist

C.S. Lewis:

creationist and anti-evolutionist

by Jerry Bergman

Oxford University professor C.S. Lewis was one of the most important Christian apologists of the last century. Toward the end of his career, he concluded that the modern theory of evolutionary naturalism is “pure hallucination”. Lewis detailed the reasons for this conclusion in several of his later writings.

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Clive Staples Lewis (29 Nov 1898 – 22 Nov 1963) was one of the most celebrated Christian apologists of the last century. Called “one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century”, Lewis was a professor of medieval and early modern English literature at Oxford University from 1925 until his death in 1963. He earned a triple first class degree in philosophy from Oxford and wrote about 50 books, mostly dealing with literary criticism and Christian apologetics. No narrow specialist, Lewis wrote on a remarkable variety and range of subjects. Although reared a nominal Christian, at age 15 he became an atheist, due in part to the arguments against design that he learned in college such as the claim that life was poorly designed—a view called dysteleology.Lewis returned to Christianity at age 33 after much self soul-searching and intensive reading of works by scholars such as George MacDonald, who used stories to convey Christian apologetics just as Lewis would become famous for doing later. Lewis soon became the “leading popular Christian apologist of the twentieth century”. He is also the “most widely read religious spokesman of our time and yet his main occupation was scholarship and university teaching.”[...] Lewis, in his essay titled “The Funeral of a Great Myth”, explained why he regarded evolution as “the great Myth of nineteenth and early twentieth century”, one that he wanted to bury. He even calls the evolutionary myth a tragedy. In 1951 Lewis wrote that evolution was “the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives” and modern civilization.